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From whence I came, 

The marks upon me show; 
The thought that weights my mind today 

Is, whither shall I go? 

* 'The latest news" 

Is not of things just done, 
But tidings brought us in advance, 

Of things that are to come. 



THE HEREAFTER 



BY 



tf^yCoood 



JOEGST PAUL, 

Minister and writer; author of "Silver Keys" etc. Professor in 
Meridian Colleges, Meridian, Miss. 




Copyrighted, 1910. 



Pentecostal Publishing Company, 
Louisville, Ky. 



to 



xA 



TABLE OF CHAPTERS. 



Page 

I. Man 5 

II. The Soul 8 

III. The Immortal Body 12 

IV. The Dropped Stitch 17 

V. The Broken Bridge 20 

VI. God's Nurseries 26 

VII. The Open Switch 29 

VIII. The Stay of Execution 34 

IX. The Intermediate State 39 

X. The Millennium 43 

XL The General Resurrection 53 

XII. The Judgment 58 

XIII. Hell. 63 

XIV. Future Rewards 74 

XV. Recognition in Heaven 80 

XVI. The Unbridged Gulf 84 

XVII. The Ultimate Kingdom 88 

XVIII. The City of The-Lord-Is-There. .92 

©CI.A259480 



CHAPTER I. 

MAN. 

It is a great mistake to attach little importance 
to man. He is not a "worm of the dust," but 
a miniature of God. Nor is it true that in the 
fall man lost God's image. He lost an im- 
portant part of this image, we admit, but very 
little of that part of the divine image which is 
peculiar to himself. He lost holiness — a gen- 
eral quality in the divine image which belonged 
to every created intelligence. But no doubt 
that in the spiritual and mental make-up of man 
there are many peculiar things, beyond our 
analysis, which are like God. These things 
have to do with man's yet unfathomed capacity 
for dominion, for power, and for service. 
Man's varied capacities are now broken, de- 
pleted, and obscured by the fall and its results ; 
but they are in him — God sees them — no mat- 
ter who he is, nor what his thralldom; no mat- 
ter if at present he may be only "the man with 
a hoe," or even the man behind the bars or 
within the asylum for the insane. In other 
words, he may be never so broken, morally, 
mentally, or physically, yet he is man; and 
down beneath the rubbish, God sees His own 

5 



6 The Hereafter. 

image, loves him the more for that reason, and 
enjoins upon every intelligent creature the duty 
of having reverence for man and seeking after 
his welfare. We have never seen man. In 
his present fallen estate God alone can see him, 
for his divine attributes are only in embryo, and 
they are covered up by a thousand accumulated 
failures and faults. He must have been a glo- 
rious creature before he fell; he will certainly 
be a glorious creature when he appears again 
in the last day, full clad, in the image and like- 
ness of God. 

An elevated conception of man is what the 
world needs; and a tendency to this high esti- 
mate of human beings, little known among the 
heathen, is seen in the wake of civilization, es- 
pecially that civilization which has for its main- 
spring the kingdom of Christ. This exalted 
conception leaves its mark in literature, in insti- 
tutions for the development of mind and body, 
for the care of unfortunates, and even in 
institutions for the detention of criminals. It 
influences the architecture of enlightened lands ; 
it affects their laws; it is traceable even in the 
places where the dead are buried. 

If there is any class of teachers on the face 
of the earth who deserve no toleration whatever, 
it is those who in the name of religion or philos- 
ophy attempt to sink people into the notion that 



The Hereafter. / 

man is not an immortal being. If they had 
universal success with their doctrine, in less than 
two centuries its depressing effect would be evi- 
dent in every institution of society, and in every 
handiwork of man. 

Man is a soul. That he has a body or is a 
body is a fact, but a subjective fact. The 
Scriptures throughout assume this, just as they 
assume the existence of God. In the story of 
creation it is said, not that man became a mortal 
body, but that he became a living (an immor- 
tal) soul. This conception has continued 
from that day, excepting when it was beclouded 
by debased moral conditions. Paul the Apos- 
tle received the truth from tlhe fountain head; 
and he lived in a state of conscious immortality, 
knowing that to be absent from the body was to 
be present with the Lord, looking upon man as 
a spiritual being separable from his mortal tene- 
ment. Indeed, as to the character of man's 
existence, he ranked him with the immortal, 
spiritual, angels — only "a little lower." And 
so the Apostle Peter, commissioned of Christ 
to break spiritual bread and minister to the 
needs of the immortal part of man, thought of 
his own body as a temporary house, but treated 
himself as an immortal being, soon to lift an- 
chor for another shore when he said, * Shortly 
I must put off this my tabernacle." 



8 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER II. 

THE SOUL. 

There is in every specimen of physical life a 
mysterious immaterial something, permeating 
every part of the organism, and called the life 
of the thing. It is, in the accommodated sense, 
sometimes called a soul, hence the expression, 
souls of animals. This something has its affini- 
ties, its proclivities, its instincts. This some- 
thing has its mysteries, Which man can- 
not fathom. But tfhat it belongs to the 
mysterious system of merely physical forces 
is evident from the fact that it wanes 
when disorder appears in the body, gradually 
failing as the machinery of the body gives 
down, diminishing oftentimes to a mere spark, 
and passing away like the blaze of an exhaust- 
ed candle. 

In a lower scale, this life is found in the 
realms of chemistry. Minerals have their affin- 
ities and their incompatibles, just as animals 
have their likes and dislikes. The traceable rela- 
tionship between animal life and other forms of 
physical life, down to the life of a stone or an 
atom, proves to us that animal life is simply one 
of the higher expressions or headings of that 



The Hereafter. 9 

force which slumbers in the bosom of the phys- 
ical universe — a fire that burns when it has a 
wick and oil to support it, but which goes out 
and is dissolved in the bosom of latent force 
when its nucleus is destroyed. 

But when we come to a study of man, we 
soon discover that physical life, with its primi- 
tive and simple likes and dislikes, is not all 
there is of him. What the horse knew in the 
days of Solomon, he knows today; no more, no 
less. But man has a mind capable of 
receiving the accumulated knowledge of 
centuries. He can learn a fact or a lesson, 
and then, without reviewing it, after every atom 
of his brain is changed, which is the case every 
seven years, more or less, he can repeat that 
lesson. It has become a part of his soul ; and 
though his physical tastes may change as his 
body puts on new material, what becomes a 
part of his mind or soul abides, showing that 
while in man's make-up there is an ever-chang- 
ing part, there is also in his make-up a never 
changing (God-like) part. Then man has a 
chain of heart-affections and other, kindred 
spiritual qualities which do not appear in ani- 
mals, and which, so far as we have ever been 
able to follow them in our observation are im- 
mortal. Man has his physical likes and dis- 
likes; he likes and dislikes with his body, just 



10 The Hereafter. 

as do the lower animals ; and as his body weak- 
ens toward death, these propensities are known 
to wane, giving evidence that they will perish 
with the body. But man's heart-loves and 
heart-aspirations often appear in their noonday 
glory when his pulse is weak and the last light 
of physical life is about to fade from his eye. 

It is known to all students of the human soul 
that below man's conscious mind, back of the 
things he knows he knows, there is a sub-con- 
scious mind, containing, not only the memories 
and lessons which he verily knows but does not 
know that he knows, but a mind which has ca- 
pacities and powers vastly beyond anything we 
can imagine, powers which have not in this 
world a field for operation — a mind too great 
for present pursuits, which prints a feeble proof 
of itself upon the tissues of the brain. 

A further study of this marvelous latent mind 
has proven that when it does come to where it 
can operate, when by a divine touch it is set 
free, it will matter but little whether or not it 
has a body through which to operate. There 
is no indication that it cannot operate through 
a perfect body, but there is clear evidence that 
it can operate apart from and independent of 
a body. Excarnate man is a foolish expression 
to the materialistic philosopher, but it does not 
take long for the Christian observer to see the 



The Hereafter. 1 1 

reasonableness of the thing. When our nerves 
are relaxed and with our brains are wrapped 
in slumber, our trips to dreamland furnish sug- 
gestions of the possibilities of the soul operating 
apart from the body. The visions and trances 
into which some have entered, have brought to 
light the existence of a mind which can operate 
when the bodily powers are dormant. Indeed 
our physical life, including a shallow mental 
life, at once serves as a transparent connecting 
medium between immortal man and the tem- 
poral world, and an opaque curtain between 
immortal man and the eternal world. 

Man's God-likeness is not in his body, form- 
ed of (something already made or created) the 
dust of the ground, but in 'his soul, created or 
made, not of substances or things in existence, 
but in the image of God. Since the birth of 
Christ it has been understood that God, though 
a Spirit, may dwell in and operate through a 
body. The excarnate or incarnate Cod are 
intelligent expressions. While we do not pre- 
sume that man was made like unto God in the 
extent of his existence, yet we do hold that man 
is like God in the mode and quality of his ex- 
istence. Being in the image of God, man is 
therefore capable of dwelling in a body or out 
of a body. 



12 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER III. 

THE IMMORTAL BODY. 

If the title of this chapter had been the resur~ 
rection body, it would not have covered all ca- 
ses, for there are many to be changed in the last 
day of this age, from mortal to immortal, with- 
out dying. Then, there have been resurrection 
bodies that were not immortal. If our title had 
been glorification, it would have been too broad, 
since in a considerable degree, redeemed souls 
in heaven are now glorified, though their bodies 
still sleep in the dust. Again, this title would 
have been too narrow; for the risen Lord was 
not glorified till the end of the forty days He 
was upon earth. Glorification means to be ex- 
alted to heavenly blessedness, to be given a re- 
ception to the kingdom above, to be acknowl- 
edged because of achievements. 

An immortal body is something supernatural. 
It cannot be, according to the laws analyzed 
and defined by finite men. The scientist can- 
not speak for anything beyond the solar system, 
but he has discovered that even the sun is de- 
creasing in diameter at the rate of about two 
hundred feet per year, and that it will not have 
heat enough to sustain any form of life on the 



The Hereafter. 13 

earth for more than ten million years. There 
is a law on earth whereby every machine must 
wear out. Indeed tliere are several laws, such 
as friction, decay and chemical disintegration; 
so that if one fails, another will infallibly do the 
work. Fate has it that everything which we 
are now allowed to touch must vanish. This 
is such a universal fact, that the thought of a 
body that never grows old or a city that shall 
abide forever, strikes the dweller on this planet 
as rather a strange notion. But is it not true 
that this world and its surroundings are fash- 
ioned to match its temporary inhabitants, to sol- 
emnize their hearts by reminding them that they 
are only sojourners, and to contribute to their 
longing for a home beyond the skies ? Do you 
think that to make a perishable system is the 
best God can do? Far from it. Who knows 
but that we are in sight of immortal worlds! 
The mariner cannot depend upon anything 
within the solar system as an infallible time- 
piece and guide. He looks away across twenty 
trillions of miles of space and locates himself 
and sets his watch by a fixed star. I will not 
be dogmatic about the fixed stars (for some 
think they move a little, though it may be mere- 
ly a yet undiscovered motion of our own sys- 
tem), but I steadfastly believe that the majority 
of organisms and structures in this vast universe 



14 The Hereafter. 

know nothing of the laws of decay, and never 
grow old. 

We have some opportunity to study an im- 
mortal human body. Jesus Christ, whose mis- 
sion it was to "show us the Father," and give 
us glimpses of more than one fact connected 
with God's ways and thoughts, lived upon 
earth forty days in an immortal body ; just such, 
we are told, as we shall have, when He comes 
and the trumpet sounds. He proved during 
that time to belong to a country whose natural 
laws have little if anything in common with 
the laws which govern us. His body was not 
obstructed by our obstructions, was not depend- 
ent upon, though capable of, our diets, evident- 
ly was not exposed to our maladies and pains, 
and was not affected by our law of gravitation. 
Were these things true because He was God? 
That might be, in part. But since we are to 
be like Him in the quality of our immortal bod- 
ies, it stands to reason that we shall pass into 
a system whose laws will surround us very much 
as they do Him. 

A body that cannot be sick ! A body that 
never grows old ! How inviting such an estate 
to a tired traveler upon the earth ! Our aches 
and pains sometimes make us long for a change. 
Elijah, notwithstanding his piety, was so sub- 
dued by hunger and fatigue that he wished for 



The Hereafter. 15 

death. But the high aim of our beneficent 
Creator and Redeemer is to bring us to a condi- 
tion where danger will be a stranger, and 
where we will be immune, not only from conta- 
gions which we have already had, and which 
destroyed in our system every element which 
made their return possible, but from all sick- 
ness and disease. If smallpox or any other 
disease can hedge its own way in a human 
body, and make its own return impossible, how 
much more can God, when He transforms us 
and puts upon us the robes of glory, destroy the 
possibility of sickness. If it is impossible for 
certain animals to have human diseases, how 
much more will it be impossible for man himself 
'to have a disease when he arises to his perfected 
state?' That matter is from henceforth eternal 
is quite a thinkable proposition. If God can 
make this possible concerning matter in its inor- 
ganic state, may He not make it possible in its 
highest organized form? If He should, that 
would settle the question of an immortal body 
— a never failing wick for the fire of life to burn 
in. The most ordinary kerosene lamp would 
burn forever, if it never corroded or decayed, 
if its wick never failed and its oil supply were 
permanent, and nothing were allowed to extin- 
guish it. So far as its blaze is concerned, it is 
immortal. To the gray haired man with stoop- 



16 The Hereafter. 

ing form, we say, cheer up ; that youthful soul 
of yours will tent some day in a tabernacle 
which shall never be folded, Which can never 
become weather-beaten. The wheels of life 
turn slowly now, but in a short while you shall 
keep step with the immortals. The blood that 
replenishes your tired brain is sluggish, and 
your rich store of knowledge is at times quite 
forgotten; but it is not gone forever. Tomor- 
row you shall put on immortality, your forgotten 
knowledge, which is still in your now impeded 
soul, will be recovered with interest, and your 
mind will be as fresh as the sparkling waters in 
the river from which you will drink. The foun- 
tain of health has almost failed you ; if a healing 
potion equal to your pains now grows in any 
herb upon the earth, no friend has found it for 
you ; but in one day, in one moment, in the 
twinkling of an eye, this mortal shall put on im- 
mortality, and a traveler, once lame and falter- 
ing, shall walk amid 'tihe everbearing trees 
Whose leaves are the emblems of health, to ex- 
perience pain and sickness no more forever. 



The Hereafter. 17 

CHAPTER IV. 

THE DROPPED STITCH. 

Who can imagine the greatness of God ! He 
occupies immensity — endless space. That 
means that His dominion has no bound. You 
might multiply the 'billions of miles by the bill- 
ions of miles for a billion of years, 
if there is an archangel who can work 
the sum, and yet you would not be started 
toward completing the extent of God's domin- 
ion. His existence is from eternity to eternity. 
With Him there was no such a thing as what 
we call a beginning, nor will there be an end. 
This God of whom we speak is a person — the 
personality who gave all other persons their 
being. He thinks, for He made the mind ; He 
sees, for He formed the eye; He hears, for He 
planted the ear. All creation bears the marks 
of His wisdom. The stars are more accurate 
tihan clocks; the planets and satellites are more 
reliable in their schedules than a metropolitan 
railroad train. The evidence is that God lives 
for His created universe, and that His created 
universe, in all its forms and phases, exists for 
His glory. He loves the oceans that roll and 
foam in majesty; He loves the mountains, with 



18 The Hereafter. 

their abounding scenery; He loves the flowers, 
which He has endowed with fragrance and 
beauty ; He loves the forests, which are parks of 
His own design; in the birds of the air, the 
beasts of the field, arid the fishes of the waters, 
God takes pleasure. Above all these, it is 
true — He says it is true — He loves man. 

God made one part of the universe for the 
odier, and created in all a relationship to every 
part. The stars were made, as were the sun 
and moon, with reference to the earth; and no 
doubt it is understood upon the planets (\i the 
planets are inhabited) that the earth was made 
with reference to the stars. 

And now we come to "the dropped stitch." 
We know of at least one (probably the only) 
stitch that has been dropped in the plan of God. 
We use this figure with reverence. When we 
speak of the dropping of <a stitch in His plans, 
we mean the occurrence of something in the uni- 
verse contrary to His will; we therefore mean 
the fall of man and its results, and the fall of 
the angels, so far as we are acquainted with 
their fall. Why a thing could happen in the 
universe contrary to God's will we do not at- 
tempt to explain, but it has happened ; and the 
disorder will abide till the dropped stitch is re- 
covered. 

We call these few thousands of years of 



The Hereafter. 19 

man's fallen estate a dropped stitch, not be- 
cause it is a light thing, but because it is destin- 
ed to be a brief period, compared to the two 
eternities. God will recover the world from its 
lapse, and things will glide on in sweet harmony 
forever, all the refuse — 'the incorrigible — being 
relegated to the far off realms of outer dark- 
ness. 

If this age of wickedness is brought to a 
close, there must be One to accomplish the 
work. That One must have a plan of re- 
demption, and in this plan provision must be 
made to pardon and sanctify the souls of men. 
And truly there is one, of the "seed of Abra- 
ham," whose death has satisfied the demands 
of justice, providing mercy and salvation for 
every penitent soul. The restoration of order 
in the fallen world must begin somewhere ; con- 
sequently God's design is that it should begin 
in the hearts of His people. By His full sal- 
vation He restores unto man's heart the order 
that prevails in heaven and that is destined to 
prevail upon earth, when His knowledge shall 
cover the earth as waters cover the sea. It is 
His pleasure that there should not remain in us 
a rival to His will, but that in us should be the 
beginning of the recovery of the dropped stitch. 



20 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER V. 

THE BROKEN BRIDGE. 

We cannot well study man's future without 
studying man. We cannot well study man, 
without taking into account his divine origin 
and his fall. When God first made man, He 
placed him in a beautiful garden, surrounded 
by a world free from all manner of curses — free 
from bad plants, from bad animals, and from 
bad weather. While only a spot of the world 
was a garden, all of its dry land was capable 
of becoming a garden as an increase in Adam's 
family created a demand for more room; and 
the seas, gentle and kind, were to furnish vast 
areas for the progress of human industry, exist- 
ing doubtless under a divine regulation which 
made it impossible for them to have been treach- 
erous in the least. 

Earth was man's home. I cannot say that 
it was to have been man's home forever, I doubt 
this. I rather think it was God's great nursery ; 
or, to be more expressive, a ship yard on the 
border of eternity's sea, where intelligent ves- 
sels, requisite in some far greater realm were 
to be formed, trained, and tested, to be trans- 
lated across the sea. There could have been 



The Hereafter. 21 

no death until sin came, but doubtless God's 
way of translating Enoch and Elijah gives us 
a glimpse of what should have been the regular 
custom of the world, had man stood the proba- 
tionary test and maintained an unfallen condi- 
tion in the world. 

We have been allowed enough insight to the 
economy of God in general to make us about 
sure that probationary testing has always been 
His rule, upon creating a responsible moral in- 
telligence; and it is quite probable that most of 
His creatures stood the test, were rewarded ac- 
cordingly, and are now among the brighter 
lights around the throne. But many of the 
angels "kept not their first estate." 

The intelligent reader of these chapters will 
readily read between, if not in the lines, our 
admission when we fill in with matters of sup- 
position, and discriminate between these and the 
facts about man and his past and future which 
may be certainly proven. It is not our purpose 
to depart from established orthodoxy anywhere, 
where orthodoxy has spoken, and we desire it 
understood that every essential or important 
statement of this book is made advisedly, and 
may be established by the word of God and 
the various branches of accredited knowledge. 

We come to the fact that man was and is a 
probationer. The thought of it is clothed in 



22 The Hereafter. 

mystery ; but the fact of it is as clear as a sun- 
beam. We need not say that it was necessary 
for God to mate all His wonderful creatures 
and try them through a probationary period, 
but we must say that He had a right to do so, 
and it appears that He did it. While we do 
not know the reason why the all-wise and all- 
powerful God should make a creature morally 
breakable — and for that reason we should bate 
our breath and abstain from foolish and critical 
questions — we do know that intuitive and 
experimental wisdom teaches man when he 
makes something which has to be entrusted 
with great responsibilities, first to test before he 
trusts that thing. 

Often when a great railroad bridge is com- 
pleted, train after train of heavy but inferior 
freight is rushed over it, with increasing weight 
and speed, till the bridge is thoroughly tested 
and it is decided that in the years to come they 
can trust it in all days, in all seasons, and upon 
dark and stormy nights, to bear up safely the 
cargoes of valuable freight and precious human 
lives. When an ocean steamer is completed, 
they test it, to see if it is seaworthy. If any of 
these great products of human skill should fail 
to stand the test it must be at the outset; and 
if they fail, the next work is that of reconstruct- 
ion. 



The Hereafter. 23 

When man was placed in the garden of 
Eden, divine wisdom suffered a reasonable 
amount of strain to be placed upon his moral 
nature. The scheme of testing was first to put 
a tree of prohibited fruit in the midst of the gar- 
den where man was otherwise unlimited in 'his 
liberties. Following this was the heavier test 
of allowing the tempter to approach and engross 
man with fascinating arguments. Under all 
this man broke down. It was whispered in 
heaven that the joy of angels and the lovely off- 
spring of God had fallen under his probationary 
test; and where there had once been a scheme 
of construction or creation, there was now a 
scheme of reconstruction or recreation. 

The thought of all heaven was to restore 
man. It laid itself out in that direction. With 
that in view the angels of God visited the earth ; 
with that in view the Son of God agreed to 
die. The bridge had broken down, and must 
be rebuilded ; the ship had proven unsea worthy, 
and must be raised and reconstructed. 

When reconstructed, the test must again 
come. The regenerated and purified man must 
remain upon the earth, not merely to fight a 
good fight, but to keep the faith. It is not long 
after a man proves thoroughly seaworthy till 
he goes hence to Where there is no more execra- 
tion — no more going out from God. If in the 



24 The Hereafter. 

meantime he breaks he must be made again ; if 
he breaks to be remade no more (Heb. 6.), he 
is doomed to the debris-pile of the universe for- 
ever. It is only those who finally stand the 
final test that shall wear the crown or enjoy the 
climax of eternal life (Rev. 2:10). 

There are three departments in the construct- 
ion of man; the physical, the intellectual and 
rfie moral. The moral is the mainspring of the 
mental and the physical. When man broke 
down morally, he immediately proceeded to 
physical and mental dilapidation. When man 
is restored in his moral nature, it does not fol- 
low that he is restored in mind and body; but 
he immediately sets out on the way to complete 
restoration. In God's redemptive scheme, He 
did not begin with a restoration of man's body 
or mind, Which would have been a waste of 
time, for man would not have retained his per- 
fect physical and mental endowments ; but with 
a restoration of man's heart or moral nature, 
upon which everything depends. Moreover, 
the Lord deliberately deferred the restoration 
of man's mental and physical natures till the 
close of the probationary period, using all these 
innocent deficiencies as agencies through which 
the restored moral nature might be tested. It 
is God's plan that today we should be perfect in 
our hearts, and tomorrow, when we stand in 



The Hereafter. 25 

his presence, we should be perfect in our 
minds and bodies. No need that we should 
be perfect in these departments sooner, for they 
are not breakable if endowed with an unbreak- 
able moral nature. The mind and body need 
no testing; the heart is the responsible agent. 
Hence man's eternal destiny hinges not upon 
the condition of his mind or body, but upon the 
condition of his heart. The trifling provoca- 
tions and inferior conditions which beset us here 
constitute the inferior matter with which the 
trains are loaded to test the bridge and prove 
it efficient for coming years, when the weight of 
worthless matter shall fall upon it no more. 



26 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER VI. 

god's nurseries. 

From what we can gather by our glimpses 
into the economy of God, His way of populat- 
ing the universe with immortal creatures is anal- 
ogous to the nurseryman who decides to start 
for himself a thousand acre orchard. The nur- 
seryman first gives the tiny trees their origin in 
a place far too small for their highest develop- 
ment; a place where they may show what they 
are, but in a very small measure. These little 
plants, at first no more noble in their appear- 
ance than the lower, groveling products of the 
vegetable kingdom, pass through a probation- 
ary period, at the end of which they are trans- 
planted from the nursery into the garden of 
their lord where there is an absolute plenty of 
room for them to become all that it is in them 
to become. Thus the human soul, the begin- 
ning of one of God's greatest products, is in 
this life compassed about with many infirmities, 
and by surroundings wfliich make impossible 
for it to do more than develop a good sugges- 
tion of its marvelous capacity. At first, the un- 
trained observer is liable to confuse it with the 
"spirit of the beast that goeth downward" 



The Hereafter. 27 

(Eccl. 3:21), and suppose that man is but a 
higher form of earth's temporary creatures. But 
as he, passing out of infancy, enters his own 
element of faith and hope and love, traces of 
higher life begin to appear, until the one Who 
intelligently studies him can soon see that this 
life is too small for him, and that it contains 
nothing sufficient to meet his higher aspirations. 
Though small in its literal scope, and limit- 
ed in its possibilities, this life is extremely im- 
portant, for here we begin. A disease in the 
tree would have to be transplanted with the 
tree into the orchard. This disease would for- 
ever limit the possibilities of the tree and mar 
the beauty of the orchard. A disease uncured 
in the young plant will therefore carry it to the 
rubbish pile. If this is true of a plant, which is 
not to blame for its deficiencies, how much 
more is it true of a rational being, Who has 
learned a way out of his limitations, Who knows 
that at great expense his Lord has provided to 
heal him in the nursery, with a view to trans- 
ferring him into the glories of the second Eden } 
Man is capable of making a choice, and 
actively seeking the object of his choice. By 
repentance, consecration and faith, he may ap- 
propriate the holiness or health that comes from 
God; so, aside from being rejected at the end 
of his life in the nursery, he will be held to 



28 The Hereafter. 

account for cleaving to his disease of sin and 
thwarting the object for which he was created. 
*The earth which drinketh in the rain that 
cometh oft upon it, and bringelh forth herbs 
meet for them by whom it is dressed, receiveth 
blessing from God; but that Which beareth 
thorns and briars is rejected, and is nigh unto 
cursing; Whose end is to be burned. But, be- 
loved, we are persuaded better things of you, 
and things that accompany salvation." Heb- 
rews 6:7-9. 



The Hereafter. 29 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE OPEN SWITCH. 

That was a serious sin that Adam committed 
in Eden. The deed itself would not have 
seemed so shocking but the principle was far- 
reaching. There was a principle in it that set 
God at naught, declaring Him no longer King, 
and involving the wreck of His government. 
There was a malignant plant which would go 
on multiplying itself and menacing the garden 
of God forever; which, instead of shriveling in 
the course of centuries, would become more 
thrifty and noxious. Adam could not have 
reckoned the gravity of his sin from his view 
point. If he could have stood on our van- 
tage ground, if he could have read a bulletin of 
the crime and suffering of yesterday, and had 
the degenerate millions of his offspring file be- 
fore him, he could have better appreciated the 
sinfulness of sin. Unless outside help came 
there could be no end to the mischievous con- 
sequences of this one sin; it therefore follows 
that if the sinner had paid the penalty, there 
could be no end to the penalty. If the crime 
was endless in its consequence, the pit into 



30 Hie Hereafter. 

which the criminal has to be dropped may be 
bottomless. 

So much for Adam's first sin ; but his second 
and later sins were no less sinful; and though 
these latter sins — if he continued in sin — were 
not necessary in order to the curse of coming 
generations and the multiplying calamities of 
the centuries, they were sufficient to produce 
these things, and were adjudged equally sinful 
with the first. And if Adam's later sins were 
sufficient to have produced unending calamities, 
and prgressive enough, if not counteracted, to 
leaven the universe, any of our sins are suffici- 
ent. We therefore stand on a footing of guilt 
with the first man tJhat sinned. 

Let us suppose a scene. It is a moonlit 
night, on the main line of a great railroad, a 
few miles from the terminal. A man looks at 
his watch and figures that within five minutes 
the fast train will go by, with a large number of 
passengers. He deliberately opens the switch 
that leads out upon a spur in the forest, stands 
back and waits to see the wreck. Now he 
hears the roar of the locomotive, now he sees 
the glare of the headlight, then the train, plung- 
ing through at fifty miles an hour, leaps out in- 
to the forest; a moment, and the wreck is com- 
plete. The engine, a burning mass, is crushed 
among the great oaks, the coaches, torn to 



The Hereafter. 31 

splinters, pile one upon another in the flames, 
and the cry of a multitude of the helpless and 
dying is enough to hush the poetry of the moon 
and stars and hills. A fortunate circumstance 
leads to the immediate arrest of the criminal, he 
is tried and hurried away to the city, and in- 
stead of meeting their loved ones, the waiters at 
the station have to listen to the news of disaster 
and look upon the monster who in one moment 
found it easy to open the way for their destruc- 
tion. Can you imagine the sentence they would 
have passed upon him in court? Indeed he 
was guilty of a capital crime. But let us sup- 
pose that he had failed in his diabolism; that 
when he opened the switch, a good man, being 
near, had rushed in and closed the switch at the 
peril of his life, just as the train was speeding 
by, and all had passed safely, unconscious of 
their narrow escape. Would our criminal have 
been less guilty? No doubt the finiteness of 
human courts would have prevented the sever- 
est penalty; but God, who reads the hearts of 
men had already booked his deed, seen its con- 
sequences, and named the penalty, without 
crediting the bad man with that deed of the 
good man which counteracted the results of his 
badness. 

What credit is it to a sinner, if his sin does 
not bear fruit for centuries to come, making a 



32 The Hereafter. 

track as wide as a planet? If it does not, it 
will be because good agencies will have closed 
the switch which he opened; but he will be 
none the less guilty. What credit is it to him, 
indeed, that he is not a larger sinner? Could 
he know more infallibly the difference between 
right and wrong if his physical strength were 
treble what it is, and he were double his pres- 
ent height? This would therefore make him no 
greater sinner. Since it is just as easy to sup- 
pose, let us suppose that he were as large as 
the American continent, and more than a match 
for all the 'angels in heaven. Let us suppose 
that his mighty frame towered among the stars, 
that he were master of the planets, and of all 
the physical forces ; that he had no one to fear 
but God, and that his might and mastery made 
him a formidable rival to God Himself. We 
see at once that a sin of his — being an act of 
rebellion — would then be more disastrous in 
fact, but it could not be any more disastrous in 
principle. Though he is only five feet high, if 
he sin against God he goes his full length to- 
ward God's dethronement; and he is due no 
credit for being weak and small. His guilt 
can be as great, then, as if he were second in 
strength only to God Himself. That philoso- 
phy which objects to the doctrine of infinite 
perdition on the ground that it cannot consist- 



The Hereafter. 33 

ently be the doom of a finite sinner forgets that 
a finite sinner does deeds of infinite conse- 
quence, and that the principle is measureless in 
its guilt, however small the sinner himself may 
be. 



34 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

THE STAY OF EXECUTION. 

There is no mercy in nature. The laws of 
the natural world operate like some great 
engine Whose master, having made her, 
keeps her oiled and steamed and going. God is 
master of nature's laws, but the only way we 
can keep from being crushed is to keep out 
from under her wheels. This is possible for a 
While; we can weather the gales, we can stem 
the storms, we can escape the earthquakes and 
the plagues and throttle the diseases which 
would prey upon us, for a While; but as cer- 
tainly as man is born, he dies. He must be 
caught somewhere in the machinery sooner or 
later. All the forces exact their toll. They 
tihat go down to the sea in ships pay toll out of 
their number; so do those who toil at their 
work, and those who sleep in their houses. 
They that are struck by lightning die ; they that 
sink into the sea drown; they that fall from 
high houses are killed ; they that are taken with 
consumption waste away ; they that practice sin 
pull through life with a quivering conscience 
and drop into the drakness of eternal night. 
All these laws are immutable, and no one need 



The Hereafter. 35 

look to nature for clemency, or call upon the 
Governor of the universe to make an exception 
in his case. 

Man as a sinner is subject to the laws that 
be, and he is under them. He may success- 
fully ride the turning timbers of vicissitude as 
tlhey float down the stream of time; but he is 
sure of the Whirlpool when his journey ends, at 
the cataract, where the stream of time plunges 
into the ocean of eternity. 

Indeed, when we are acquainted with that 
law by which sin transfers its subject from life 
to death, the wonder is that Adam lived so long 
after he sinned in Eden, and that our days on 
earth, with gladness interspersing our sorrows, 
and sunshine intervening our shadows, are so 
long extended. Did not God say to Adam, 
"In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt 
surely die)" Is it any less true today > Why is it 
that the ax of execution, hanging over the sin- 
ner's head, does not drop and cut him off, ac- 
cording to the law ; for it is a law, a divine law, 
a natural law ; and its fulfillment is due to come 
true as promptly as the breaking of the crim- 
inal's neck follows the falling of the hangman's 
trap. He that sins is his own hangman, under 
distributive justice. What hand holds the trap 
that its falling is delayed? And may not the 
hand that can thus delay the inevitable prevent 



36 The Hereafter. 

trie inevitable? Nay, since I have found that 
He can, and that for all who follow Him, He 
does, let me go further with my interesting 
search and ask how, and by what process does 
God, who cannot lie, who has seen best to or- 
dain that the wages of sin be death, obviate the 
enforcement upon my guilty soul of a law 
which is as immutable as the Creator's throne. 
Zaleucus of the seventh century B. C. was 
one of the earliest compilers of Grecian law. 
He became ruler of a Greek colony in south- 
ern Italy, for which he was lawgiver, as it was a 
miniature nation. The penalty for a certain sin 
was blindness. Soon after this law was made, 
the son of Zaleucus was arrested and convicted 
of this crime, and the people requested the good 
ruler to make an exception and not put out the 
eyes of his son. It was his impulse as a father 
to spare the son, but the public welfare de- 
manded the enforcement of the law, and as a 
ruler, Zaleucus could not exempt the young 
man. There were in the breast of this ruler two 
motives which were so nearly irreconcilable 
that it required desperate measures for them to 
abide together. One was the motive off a fath- 
er, the other was the motive of a king. The sac- 
rifice of the one motive involved a sentence upon 
a much loved son ; the sacrifice of the other en- 
dangered the welfare of the government. Zal- 



The Hereafter. 37 

eucus could do neither, he would do neither, 
and he did neither. Then, What did he do? 
Stepping down from his tribunal he ordered his 
executioner to strike out one of his own eyes, 
and one of his son's eyes. The integrity of the 
government was maintained, the son was saved 
from the force of the penalty, and both the 
ruler and his son carried a scar which proclaim- 
ed that justice and mercy had met together, 
and that by some marvelous process which only 
love could seek out, neither justice nor mercy 
had sacrificed its character. 

If we let this erring son represent sinners and 
the ruler represent God, let us hunt for the 
scars. Look for the final word picture of Jesus 
Christ, and you will find nail prints in His 
hands; similar marks will appear in His feet; 
!ook again, and you will see in His side the 
mark of a wound made by that famous spear- 
thrust when they removed Him from the cross. 
Much is made of these scars in the inspired 
writings; and no doubt the redeemed of all 
ages will look upon them as an eloquent me- 
morial of the day when mercy and truth met 
together and righteousness and peace kissed 
each other — the day when the everlasting per- 
manency of the divine government was reaf- 
firmed, and the boundless love of God for man 
was emphasized. As for us, our scars are not 



38 The Hereafter. 

hard to find. Sin has born its fruit in pains, 
maladies, wounds, disappointments, poverty, 
sorrow and death; and the most penitent and 
pious have nevertheless carried the scars and 
paid these temporary penalties. But our illus- 
tration is not at all exact in what it sets forth. 
The proportion of penalty borne by the son of 
Zaleucus does not represent the proportion of 
the penalty for our sins which we bear. That 
penalty which we suffer is only the local and in- 
cidental consequences of sin, Which in the na- 
ture of the case cannot even be equitably di- 
vided among us. The evening up does not 
come this side of the sinner's future state of per- 
dition. The division of the penalty which our 
Lord makes with us provides that it shall be 
practically all His; and to all lawful and gov- 
ernmental ends, it is all His; "Jesus paid it 
all." "The sufferings of this present time are 
not worthy to be compared with the glory that 
shall be revealed in us;" and when we calcu- 
late that every anguish and hardship of life 
that is worthily assumed works out for us a far 
more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, 
we have to decide that God so regarded the 
completeness of Christ's ransom that He jeal- 
ously gave Him all the credit for the redemp- 
tion, neutralizing what little penalty we bear 
here by reimbursing us proportionately in the 
world to come. 



The Hereafter. 39 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE INTERMEDIATE STATE. 

We use the term intermediate state because 
it is in use, being understood to refer to a man 
in that period between the death and the resur- 
rection of his body. That there was also an 
intermediate place, where the souls of the right- 
eous should abide between death and the resur- 
rection was the interpretation of Old Testa- 
ment teachings by the more pious Jews prior to 
the time of Christ. They used the word para- 
dise with reference to such a place, though this 
word had a broader employment, and it has a 
still broader use to-day. The accurate religious 
use of the word paradise will no doubt make it 
a synonym for heaven, and it seems clear that 
the Lord used it in this sense when he com- 
forted the pardoned thief on the cross. There 
is not sufficient ground to hold that two sep- 
arate places are provided for man in his two 
modes of existence after this life. It is quite 
apparent that the soul of Stepnen went to the 
abode of his Lord. Acts 7:56, 60. If the 
home of disembodied saints must be different 
from the home of those clothed in their glorified 
bodies, then the abode of Enoch and Elijah, 



40 The Hereafter. 

and of our Lord and of the few honored saints 
who arose at his resurrection must be separate 
from that of all other redeemed ones who have 
been gathered to tlheir fathers. This is hardly 
to be presumed. Angels are not carnate be- 
ings ; a different order from man, but the mode 
of existence with an angel and the soul of a 
man must be identical; yet heaven is suited 
for angels. May it not be as well suited for the 
souls of the departed saints? If it is suited for 
them, the thought of a separate place under the 
name of paradise is gratuitous. 

There is hardly a doubt that the body of 
Moses was sleeping in the dust at the time of 
Christ's transfiguration. The record says he 
died, and God buried him. There is no room 
to assume that he had been raised from the 
dead, for the inspired writer specifically says 
that Christ became the firstfruits of them that 
slept; this cuts us off from assuming that any- 
body, prior to Christ's resurrection, had been 
raised from the dead into a glorified body. Yet 
on the mount of transfiguration we see the trio, 
representing the three modes of human exist- 
ence. Jesus in mortal flesh; Elijah in his trans- 
lated body; Moses without the body. That 
they are all together today is the most whole- 
some idea of heaven. True it may be, and 
probably is, that Moses was among the num- 



The Hereafter. 41 

ber of saints Who arose witih Jesus, and walked 
the streets of Jerusalem after his resurrection; 
but we will have to manufacture grounds to say 
that Moses and Elias were not together prior 
to this, that they came to the mount of trans- 
figuration from different directions. The ma- 
terialists could solve this for us if we had time 
to listen to their solution, by telling us that 
Moses and Elijah were not really present at 
the transfiguration, but that Peter and John 
(and Jesus) had a vision of them; but this 
would create the absurd condition of Jesus 
speaking in an apostrophe. If we were put to 
the task of proving such things as the real pres- 
ence of Moses and Elias on the mount of trans- 
figuration we would never get through wasting 
time on quibbles. 

Jesus is in heaven, in his glorified body. 
None but the rank infidel disputes that. The 
Christian acceptance of the Scriptures leads us 
to conclude that Paul had inspired insight and 
was infallibly correct when he said that for him 
to be absent from the body would mean for him 
to be present with the Lord. The old hero 
loved his work, and counted it a privilege for 
him to toil and suffer for the Master. He was 
loath to turn loose the gospel plow; he said, "I 
am in a strait betwixt two;" to live would be 
Christ, but to die would be gain, for he would 



42 The Hereafter. 

be in the immediate presence of his Lord. Nor 
was he to be disappointed. The strife is done, 
and he is there today. One cruel drop of Nero's 
ax, a spattering of consecrated blood, the quiv- 
ering of a* tired body, and all was over; the 
work of a chosen vessel was done ; the time of 
his anchor lifting had come, and he was off, 
across seas of ether, to his heavenly home. To- 
day the ashes of the honored expounder of the 
doctrine of the resurrection rest in the city of 
Rome, awaiting the last trump, for the trump 
shall sound ; and he, the lover of the unlovely, 
the friend of the pagan, our toiling, self-sacrific- 
ing spiritual parent, our immortal benefactor, is 
with his Lord. 



The Hereafter. 43 

CHAPTER X. 

THE MILLENNIUM. 

A candid writer of a book bearing the title 
of this could not well ignore the subject of the 
Millennium, though this is more appropriately 
the future of the world than the future of man. 
Scripture passages applied to this subject are 
usually of uncertain application, and capable 
of various interpretations. Too much empha- 
sis upon it tends to materialism and diverts the 
believer's mind from the thought of that city 
which hath foundations, whose builder and 
maker is God. Not for a moment would we tol- 
erate the untenable theory that this earth is to 
be the eternal heaven of all redeemed mankind. 
We would about as soon try to prove that the 
heart of the earth were hell. Heaven was an 
existing fact when this planet became fallen. 
It was an existing fact when Enoch and Elijah 
took their exit from this world ; and When Jacob 
spent the night at Bethel. Stephen, before his 
death, saw into its open portal, Paul heard the 
'language of its inhabitants, and many a dying 
saint has been met by its light and greeted by 
its hosts. We have no differences to split with 
materialism. It is true that John saw the heav- 
enly Jerusalem, coming down from God, and 



44 The Hereafter. 

it is evident that his vision was of the real thing 
— a city, with a river, with trees, streets, and 
measurable walls; but his expression, "I saw 
(it) coming down," was not to be taken liter- 
ally, since it referred to a city that cannot be 
moved; the vision was all that came to him. 

The theory of a physical reign of departed 
saints a thousand years in tike bodily presence 
of Christ upon this earth is based upon one ob- 
scure passage of Scripture (Rev. 20), which 
does not positively say that these saints shall 
have risen from the dead, or that the reign shall 
be upon earth, or that it shall be direct and lit- 
eral. It is very possible that this passage re- 
fers to an event entirely separate from that good 
age of the world Which the prophets foretell, 
which we have learned to call the millennium, 
and which, if we do not misunderstand the 
Scriptures, is to be inaugurated about the time 
of the second coming of Christ. It seems from 
the trend of Revelation, and the setting of that 
passage that the thousand years represent the 
period of the general Judgment, and it is not 
improbable that the allusion to the beheaded 
saints means that they were raised, and stood 
conspicuous and honored among the assembled 
hosts around the judgment bar, as the dead, 
small and great, were standing before God, and 
the books were being opened. 



The Hereafter. 45 

So far as trie "first resurrection" is concerned, 
we are not warranted in saying that it here re- 
fers to order ; first may refer to quality, and cor- 
respond with the term "better resurrection," in 
Hebrews 1 1 :35 ; for all the holy have part in 
it, yet it is evident that Jesus had taught Mary 
that the resurrection of the saints should be at 
the last day. John 1 1 :24. It is true that or- 
der is referred to in two other passages, namely 
1 Cor. 15:23, 24, and 1 Thess. 4:16; but the 
former deals with the order of Christ and His 
people, and the latter simply states that the 
dead in Christ shall rise first — before we which 
are alive and remain shall be gathered up. The 
question of whether there will be one or two 
resurrections in point of time is not worth con- 
tending over. Maybe the righteous will rise 
first, but we see no particular reason why 
they should, as all are to be separated 
and judged together; and, if the resur- 
rections are to be separate, the principal refer- 
ences to the resurrection do not attach enough 
importance to this detail to mention it; see, for 
instance, Daniel 12:2 and John 5:28, 29. 

The prophets give to us a very pretty picture 
of an age of righteousness and peace, when the 
knowledge of the Lord shall cover the earth as 
the waters cover the sea, when the desert shall 
blossom as the rose, when ferocious animals 



46 The Hereafter. 

shall no longer prowl the forests, and all the 
serpents that remain shall be harmless pets; 
when holiness to the Lord will be the watch- 
word, an imprint and token of genuineness and 
equity upon the commonest manufactured utili- 
ties. In short the Wicked one shall have dis- 
appeared from the earth; 2 Thess. 2:8. And 
just here is a key that will explain how all this 
is to come to pass; both gradually and instan- 
taneously ; the sum of it will be an achievement 
of the Lord Jesus Christ. Speaking of that 
Wicked one, the writer says, "Whom the Lord 
shall consume with the spirit (or breath) of 
His mouth, and shall destroy with the bright- 
ness of His coming." This certainly means 
that the world's millennium will follow an age 
of moral and religious progress and improve- 
ment, and finally come in by an epoch, the sec- 
ond coming of Christ. The Bible and the 
preached and exemplified word represent the 
breathings of Christ on earth, and these agen- 
cies are working among the nations, to elevate 
mankind and diminish diabolism and the power 
of Satan. Most marvelously have they work- 
ed through the Christian centuries. While 
millions have been sent on to the New Jerusa- 
lem through the instrumentality of the gospel, 
its leaven has worked wholesale improvement 
among the nations of earth. In all the ages of 



The Hereafter. 47 

Chaldean, Egyptian, and Chinese history they 
had no age of progress to be compared with 
that of the nations in the last few centuries, 
where the gospel of Christ has been published. 
They went to a high state of pagan civilization, 
but it was by thousands of years of plodding; 
and public conscience and private ethics were 
by common consent exceedingly crude. More- 
over, they reached a limit over which they 
could not pass, and then began to drag down- 
ward to a miserable depth. The prophecy 
with regard to Christian civilization — that civ- 
ilization in which the leaven of the gospel is at 
work — is that it will reach no altitude beyond 
which it cannot rise, and though about the time 
of die final restitution there will be a lapse, 
around the edges, as it were (Rev. 20:7-9), 
the inroads of Satan upon the redeemed com- 
monwealth will never be serious, and there will 
be no lasting decline. 

Our Lord is today breathing upon the na- 
tions and reducing the evils of the world. Some 
brethren maintain the opposite as to the decline 
of evil, but, whether they are conscious of the 
fact or not, their contention, being without cor- 
roboration in history or foundation in Scripture, 
is for the sake of a dogma relating to the second 
coming of Christ. They have not seen where 
they could dispense with the contention and re- 



48 The Hereafter. 

main premillennialists, tihough they could do it ; 
and to dispense with this notion would add 
much to a wholesale optimism, and more intel- 
ligent missionary and evangelistic motives. 

The kingdom is coming ; the leaven is work- 
ing; there is a march of progress which if we 
•had eyes to see would add new joy to our lives. 
The readers of prophecy Who see great scare 
crows ahead have fallen short in their interpre- 
tations. Those who imagine that mediaeval 
Romanism is destined to menace our free gov- 
ernment; that capital and labor have not 
the resources to adjust their differences without 
mutual destruction, that there is not sufficient 
balm in Gilead for the race troubles, that mo- 
nopolies and trusts are destined to be the ulti- 
mate masters of civilization, that the Orient will 
combine against the Occident in annihilating 
wars, have simply borrowed trouble and crossed 
bridges that will never be built. Of course 
there will be a few wars along, and the material 
reduction of armament may be deferred for 
many years. Of course there will be race 
friction, as the lower strata of humanity strug- 
gle, under the stimulus of the Christian spirit, 
to rise. Business methods will be abused, and 
capital and labor will have many peaceful and 
a few sanguine struggles for what they claim 
to be their rights. Mediaeval Romanism is 



The Hereafter. 49 

gradually fading, and an institution of another 
character is slowly but surely taking its place. 
The breasts of all mankind are being filled with 
a spirit which assures the impossibility of papal 
usurpation, and Jesuitism in its rank form is 
ashamed of its own countenance. 

Traceable plainly to the spirit of Jesus is a 
large number of reforms. Public conscience, 
which means our ideal for others, never knew 
such a quickening as it is undergoing today. 
Such things as lotteries, pugilism, oppressive 
combines, gambling, traffic in impure foods, in- 
toxicants, and drugs that menace society, things 
which were allowed to resolve themselves, un- 
der old regimes, things many of which did not 
conflict with the ethical and economical stand- 
ards of yesterday, are being outlawed today. 
The day of slavery is over. The day of peon- 
age is passing. Prisons are being reformed. 
Hospitals and asylums are dotting the land. 
Human life is held more sacred, and the com- 
mon man is a greater quantity. Duels as a 
mode of settling differences between men of 
honor belong to the relics of barbarism ; courts 
of arbitration and peace councils are common, 
and many a conflict is averted. The savagery 
of international warfare is reduced by the regu- 
lations of an international court. The gospel 
of the Prince of Peace is making inroads upon 



50 The Hereafter. 

darkened nations so rapidly that a man has to 
keep his eyes wide open to keep track of the 
new achievements of the gospel in heathen 
lands, and to keep acquainted with the new 
champions of missionary enterprise who are ev- 
ery year coming upon the stage. 

Let not the dissenting school misunderstand 
us. Some may think to quote 2 Peter 3 :3, 4, 
as a response to this chapter: * There shall 
come in me last days scoffers, walking after their 
own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of 
his coming? for since the father's fell asleep, 
all things continue as they were from the be- 
ginning of the creation." But we are not scof- 
fers, we walk not after our own lusts, and we 
see the promise of His coming, not only in the 
Bible, but in all the signs of the times. All 
things do not continue as they were. As the 
day draws nearer the light shines brighter and 
the strength of His ancient enemy wanes upon 
the earth. We would not be guilty of crying 
peace when there is no peace ; we do not think 
of pacifying a nation or a people in their sins, 
and this nation and people have many sins. We 
do not hold that the general reforms, influenced 
by the leaven of the kingdom, prove that a ma- 
jority or even a large multitude of individuals 
are saved from their sins and ready for heaven. 
We fear they are not. There is need of a 



The Hereafter. 51 

great spiritual awakening everywhere. There 
is need of individual workers to persuade people 
everywhere to receive Christ for their personal 
salvation. A great outpouring of the Spirit is 
needed in all the churches ; but the best way for 
us to accomplish this is not by a depressing mis- 
interpretation of prophecy and a habitual be- 
moaning of the fortunes of the world. This is 
not conducive to religious joy, yet the joy of 
the Lord in our hearts is an essential, if we 
would teach transgressors His ways, and cause 
sinners to be converted unto Him. The man 
Who wins souls is the one on whom the sun 
shines. Perfect love hopeth all things. 

The ideal age of the world will be 
the last age, before the final consummation 
of all things. With all the general im- 
provements there will be much lack of 
faith at the coming of Christ, much neg- 
lect of personal salvation, and many of the very 
stewards of the Lord living and working out of 
the divine order. There will be some intense 
types of ungodliness, despite the glaze of a 
God-given civilization. A class called evil 
men and seducers will become more intense, 
more artful in vice and deception, and more 
set in their ways. The coming of Christ, which 
the Scriptures uniformly teach us is to judge the 
world, will finally destroy this wickedness. 



52 The Hereafter. 

It will be remembered that tine judgment is 
to be a period, not a mere twenty-four hour 
day ; that it is to be somewhere in the elements, 
where the throne of God will be the gravitative 
center. It is not improper to suppose that dur- 
ing this period things will continue upon the 
earth, and Christian civilization will have 
reached its climax; that this will be the millen- 
nium ; that at the close of the judgment period, 
be it a thousand years, or more, or less, those 
still living, having been preceded by the dead 
in Christ, shall be changed and judged, follow- 
ing a brief period of lapse in which Satan shall 
have renewed his energies against the splendid 
civilization of the last days — then the consum- 
mation, and eternity, no part of which is yet de- 
lineated to us by Him Who designs the future 
of the creatures He has made in His image. 



The Hereafter. 53 

CHAPTER XI. 

THE GENERAL RESURRECTION. 

The resurrection of the body is a mystery, 
says the apostle; a phenomenon among the 
forces which the laws with Which we are ac- 
quainted cannot explain. The Greeks were 
gifted in explaining things, and whatever was 
unfathomable to them was foolish. They re- 
ceived Paul's sermon very well at Athens till 
he spoke of the resurrection of the dead; then, 
"Some mocked : and others said, We will hear 
thee again of this matter." We have a great 
many Greeks today among Christian scholars. 
Our modern educators have drank at the foun- 
tains of Hellen and digged among the ancient 
ruins of a civilization which Providence folded 
away to give place to a better testament, till 
the mantel of those polished rationalists has fal- 
len upon them, and, with all its capacity and 
incapacity, the spirit of Greek wisdom has pre- 
empted their minds. If some of the present 
day writers upon the resurrection could drop 
badk nineteen centuries and be transferred to 
Mars hill they could preach a sermon on the 
resurrection which would please the Greek phi- 
losophers and add to the glamour of St. Paul's 
unpopularity at the Areopagus. 



54 The Hereafter. 

The subject of the resurrection has a wide 
place in both the Old and New Testaments. 
In the early apostolic preaching it was made 
prominent, as if they regarded it a necessary 
element in a well rounded faith; and, so far 
were they from carelessness in regard to the 
subject that they suffered much opposition 
which would not have come, had ithey consent- 
ed to remain silent upon this hope-inspiring 
subject. 

That our body shall be raised a spiritual 
body is set over against the fact that it shall be 
sown a natural body ( 1 Cor. 1 5 :44) ; and 
what the one means ought to be easily deter- 
mined, when we ascertain the meaning of tbe 
other. A natural body is a body hedged about 
by what we call natural laws and conditions, 
and subject to them. It is a body that may be 
hurt by a blow ; that may be drowned or burn- 
ed; that may get sick or tired; that may grow 
old or wear out; that is subject to gravity and 
dependent on the ordinary vehicles of locomo- 
tion; it is a member of a race that must eat and 
sleep, and may propagate its kind. These and 
others are the attributes of a natural body which 
we are allowed to presume do not belong to a 
body whidh is not subject to natural laws, but 
which is passed into another realm of govern- 
ment and sensation. How many of the at- 



The Hereafter. 55 

tributes of a spiritual or immortal body are held 
in common with a natural body we are not in 
position to determine. 

The apostle plainly teaches that this immor- 
tal body is raised out of the ashes of the buried 
mortal. He does not claim that the exact 
chemical atoms will be cast anew ; the chemical 
atoms of many a body have been scattered 
abroad, passing into vegetation and into the 
formation of other bodies, but this does not in- 
terfere with Paul's theory of the resurrection. 
He purposely discusses ( 1 Cor. 1 5 ) the plastic 
quality in the hand of God of those elements 
out of which flesh is composed, where he speaks 
of bhe different kinds of flesh, and of the bodies 
celestial and terrestrial. While there may not 
be much change in the chemical proportions of 
the body, it is believed upon pretty good evi- 
dence that the material of the body changes 
completely about every seven years. There is 
of course a change in the relation of the atoms 
of the body to one another at different times in 
life, so that we may say that as age comes on 
the relation of the atoms of the body become 
strained. It has been held with good show of 
reason that the formation of the body is a prod- 
uct of the soul ; that the soul clothes itself in the 
years allotted for physical growth, and that it 
is the designer of its own costumes in all abso- 



56 The Hereafter. 

Iutely normal cases. The consistency of this 
view appears in the fact that two boys of iden- 
tical physical heredity may be led into opposite 
pursuits, or kinds of education, or one into good 
habits and pious ways and the other into bad 
habits and infidel meditations and it will affect 
their features, and sometimes their entire physi- 
cal form. 

The Baltimore Sun quotes a chemist as esti- 
mating that all the constituents of a hundred 
and fifty-pound man are contained in 1 ,200 
eggs. He said: "There is enough gas in a 
man to fill a gasometer of 3,649 cubic feet. 
There is enough iron to make four nails. There 
is enough fat to make 75 candles and a large 
cake of soao. There is enough phosphorous 
to make 8,064 boxes of matches. There is 
enough hydrogen in him to fill a balloon and 
carry him up to the clouds. The remaining 
constituents of a man would yield, if utilized, 
six cruets of salt, a bowl of sugar and ten gal- 
lons of water." 

With such a form as a man has made for 
himself, out of the grave where his ashes lie, 
God proposes to clothe again the soul that is 
in hades, and this is the resurrection; only the 
glory of the righteous and the shame of the 
wicked is to be enhanced, because of the trans- 
parency of their immortal bodies, out of which 



The Hereafter. 57 

their characters, good or bad, shall shine as 
through a lens. 

But suppose that we or any other writer have 
poorly delineated the idea of the resurrection; 
suppose that much we hold proves speculative, 
under better light; suppose that our plea for it, 
as has been the case with some, has weakened 
our cause; it remains that the dead, small and 
great, shall rise; that those in the graves shall 
hear the voice of God ; and no figurative theory, 
or germ theory; or trichotomy theory, can meet 
the specifications of Scripture. The presence 
of mystery in the doctrine is admitted, though, 
as the apostle says, it is no greater than the mys- 
tery attending a grain of corn Which perishes 
today to be succeeded by many grains of like 
composition, merging from the same grave in a 
few months. The apostle had not the remotest 
idea of teaching by this illustration the foolish 
theory that every human body possesses an im- 
perishable germ; but rather, by an illustration 
Which was incidentally in the neighborhood of 
analogous, he sought to impress the inquirer 
that mysterious things obtain and are demon- 
strated before our eyes, Where no human law 
can explain the mystery, and that we should not 
question the ability of God who takes the chem- 
icals of earth and makes new corn over the 
grave of the old, to clothe our soul in an im- 
mortal body on the resurrection morning. 



58 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER XII. 

THE JUDGMENT. 

We are responsible beings; a consciousness 
of this is native in us. A man must answer for 
his behavior here ; and according to the Script- 
ures, he must answer in an open court. The 
grounds of every sentence must be stated in 
plain terms, and we are taught that a represen- 
tative multitude of mankind shall witness the 
evidence and hear the Judge as He reviews the 
case and pronounces the sentence. The 
Scriptures continually enforce upon us the 
thought that this universe is under a stated gov- 
ernment, that its Ruler knows all things, and 
that the penalty for the violation of His laws 
is infallible, not to be evaded by technicalities, 
not to be confused by shrewd attorneys; that 
no case will under any circumstances need to be 
remanded for a new trial, and that the deserts 
of no one will be doubtful. The Judge will 
not be perplexed over any character, as we are 
sometimes in doubt, but will readily give His 
reasons for an adverse or a favorable sentence 
as the names are called. Having made man a 
rational being, God proposes to recognize the 
ri^ht of man to understand the terms of every 
sentence. 



The Hereafter. 59 

That God knows now the deserts of every 
one, and that every soul at death passes imme- 
diately to his reward might make it difficult, at 
a glance, to see the reason for a general judg- 
ment; but the fact that God has ordained that 
such a thing shall be is to us sufficient, even if 
we could not comprehend a reason. But a 
reason seems not far to seek: If God is pleased 
to outline before a representative jury the rea- 
son for every sentence, to review the lives of the 
people, it is necessary that a period next to 
the final consummation should be set apart for 
this purpose. Every government has its court 
week. If with reference to every life there 
must be a revelation, if for the righteous there 
must be a formal vindication, we can see why 
God hath appointed a day in which to judge 
the world (Acts 17:31). We are taught that 
"God shall bring every work into judgment, 
with every secret thing, whether it be good or 
whether it be evil'*; that 'we must all 
appear before the judgment seat of Christ." 

As suggested in Chapter IV., a stitch has 
been dropped in the plan of God. From the 
day that the stitch was dropped, God set on 
foot agencies to recover it, and bring things 
back like they ought to be. This could not be 
done in a moment, without intercepting some 
events which might be of great importance to 



60 The Hereafter. 

the universe. It could not be done, even grad- 
ually, without great sacrifice, and we do not 
know that in the economy of divine government 
it would have been possible completely to re- 
cover the lapse in a few days. But after all, 
a few thousand years are with God not more 
than a few days, and millions of years from 
now, when we look back, though we will still 
be impressed with the gravity of the fall and the 
importance of these few years of probation, the 
period of disorder will seem but a span. The 
day of judgment, instead of being the first day 
of eternity I should prefer to say will be the 
last day of time. It is a part of God's pro- 
cess in the restoration. It would seem that He 
has chosen to divide the restoration period into 
two days — the day of gospel and the day of 
judgment; taking the word day to mean a pe- 
riod, which it often does, in history and in 
prophecy. By the gospel period we do not 
mean merely the Christian era, but we use the 
term in its broader sense, to embrace all the 
centuries in which God is found inviting man to 
be saved by faith in Him, from the days of 
righteous Abel till the end of the days of grace, 
which, during the millennium, according to the 
solution which we have suggested, will overlap 
the judgment period. 

The judgment, then, as well as the gospel, is 



The Hereafter. 61 

one of God's methods in effecting the restitu- 
tion, the gospel being tihe better, and hence be- 
ing allowed a long tenure. The gospel method 
is suasive and the judgment method is compul- 
sory. The gospel method saves all that at- 
tend upon it, the judgment method damns all 
who, rejecting the gospel method, wait for it. 
All that can be won are won, then comes judg- 
ment, and the rest are forced; but since no one 
can be forced into an acceptable service of God, 
all that wait till judgment must bow the knee 
and die. 

All differences must be adjusted; all debts 
must be settled; all who have sinned in secret 
must be found out, and the treachery and in- 
justice of the cruel and the unjust must over- 
take them. It is the property of judgment to 
see that all this is done. 

Before that tribunal must appear every be- 
ing that is fallen or that has ever been fallen, 
that the one class may be formally and forever 
dismissed from the presence of God, and that 
the recovery of the other class may be ratified 
and confirmed. Even the angels that kept not 
their first estate are reserved in everlasting 
chains unto the judgment of that great day. 

In the judgment period the physical universe 
shall be called upon, as the revelator saw it, 
to emphasize in the presence of a rational uni- 



62 The Hereafter. 

verse the terribleness of sin and the dreadful- 
ness of God. The stars shall fall from heaven 
as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs when she 
is shaken of a mighty wind; t!he moon shall 
be turned to a clot of blood, and a crepe of 
blackness shall be spread over the face of the 
sun. The earth shall reel under the tread of 
the judgment host; the sea shall heave and 
belch forth her sleeping multitudes. The grave- 
yards shall cleave asunder, the tombs shall 
scatter and the dead, small and great, shall 
stand before God. It shall be then as if there 
were no atonement — there will be none — the 
days of grace will be ended. The doves of 
mercy and love which formerly had perched 
upon our premises and rested at our fire sides 
will have spread their wings and sought retreat 
behind the throne of a just God. Not a star 
of hope will shine throughout all the dark firm- 
ament ; and on every side there will be no repre- 
sentative of God — but sheriffs of justice. Al- 
tars will fall! Sanctuaries, no longer needed 
by an unworthy race, will be cast down ; angry 
lightnings will play abroad, and muttering 
thunders will announce to trembling men and 
angels that God is a God of absolute justice, 
true to His word, and that it is a fearful thing 
to sin and fall into His hands. 



The Hereafter. 63 

CHAPTER XIII. 

HELL. 

There is not any room to doubt that Jesus 
taught the doctrine of the future punishment of 
the wicked, and it appears that He dwelt upon 
the subject, not as a theme which He enjoyed, 
but as a necessary warning, a primary element 
in the doctrine of repentance. At the close of 
one of His severest messages on the wrath of 
God (Matt. 23) the mood of the Teacher is 
shown in the fact that He weeps and utters those 
words so celebrated for tenderness, beginning, 
"O, Jerusalem, Jerusalem." 

It appears evident that in all the centuries 
since the ministry of Jesus the regular churches 
have held consecutively the view that they now 
hold concerning the future punishment of the 
wicked, and that it does not materially differ 
from what Jesus taught. We hold that What 
He taught was infallibly correct, even if it 
should fail to tally with our sentiments and de- 
ductions. 

There cannot be law without penalty. Men 
are not paying the penalty for their sins in this 
world. It is true that suffering frequently fol- 
lows sin, quickly ; but often this is not the case. 



64 The Hereafter. 

It is true that the way of transgressors is hard; 
but in this world there are exceptions even to 
this rule, while, in a temporal sense, righteous 
people sometimes suffer much and have a hard 
time on account of the doings of the wicked. 
It does not take a very smart man to see, apart 
from the Bible, that on the hypothesis of a di- 
vine law, which must carry a divinely prescrib- 
ed penalty, there must be a future punishment. 
Then when we consult the Bible on the sub- 
ject, we are repeatedly assured, in language 
which must be understood, that there is a future 
punishment for the ungodly. 

It will not be out of place for us to glance 
briefly at the philosophy of this punishment. 
First of all we would observe that it is a natural 
result of sin. While it may not be the imme- 
diate result, it is the final and inevitable. Some- 
one once asked a preacher to locate hell for 
him, and the preacher said, Sir, hell is located 
at the end of a sinner's earthly life. And why 
is punishment the consequence of sin? Why 
did not a great and good Creator make His 
laws of cause and effect to operate in another 
direction? We answer, it would have been 
against His government if His intelligences 
could have sinned with impunity. Under the 
economy of the universe, Which we are too finite 
to criticise, and which, if we were less finite we 



The Hereafter. 65 

would not want to criticise, punishment is a ne- 
cessity — hell is a necessity. God has myriads 
who possess the capacity of monarchs ; and they 
must be impressed that it is an awful thing to 
sin against Him. 

Driven, as all reasonable men must be, face 
to face with (the fact of future punishment, our 
first impulse will be to inquire into the charac- 
ter of this punishment. 

First of all we would notice that it must be 
a state of unspeakable wretchedness and an- 
guish, for it is set in antithesis to heaven. If 
heaven is a 'high place hell is called the low 
place. If heaven is a city whose gates stand 
open forever, and where it is perpetual day, 
hell is a pandemonium where night reigns. For 
the joys of heaven we have the sighings of hell, 
for the angels of heaven, we have the devils 
of hell, and for the fruition of hope on one 
hand, we have the culmination of despair on 
the other. We do not think it is necessary for 
us to insist on any particular form of punish- 
ment in hell ; it is enough for us to say that hell 
is the opposite of heaven. The many figures 
of speech, such as a dark ni^ht, a troubled sea, 
,or a lake of fire, are given to convey to our dull 
perception the dreadfulness of that awful world 
from which God has hidden his face. 

Another startling and overwhelming truth 



66 The Hereafter. 

about this future punishment is that it is eternal. 
To this, many people take exceptions; and we 
will respectfully notice their objections in the 
proper place. 

The two chief and sufficient evidences that 
future punishment is eternal are the following: 

1 . Man is an eternal being. He is possessed 
of natural immortality. When God breathed 
life into his body man became an immortal 
soul. This immortality is a fact of conscious- 
ness in every well-adjusted man. This con- 
sciousness was corroborated by the great Teach- 
er, who assumed that man had a soul (Matt. 
16:26) using the word soul in the sense we 
here use it, as the immortal part of man. He 
brought immortality to light, says Paul, one 
of His chief expounders. And Paul himself 
expressed his consciousness of this immortality, 
and his inspired knowledge of it, when he said 
that at the death of his body he would depart 
and be with Christ (in heaven). Peter also 
expressed this as his understanding of Christ's 
doctrine of immortality, and John in his apoca- 
lyptic vision saw the souls of them whose bodies 
had been decapitated and were still sleeping in 
the dust. In treating a soul as immortal Jesus 
made no difference between the righteous and 
the wicked, really having more to say about the 
perpetuation of consciousness in the wicked af- 



The Hereafter. 67 

ter tlheir physical death. If you couple the fact 
of man's natural immortality with the fact that 
his disease of sin is incurable, and that it is a 
soul disease, you have the first and primary es- 
tablished proof of eternal punishment. There 
is a time when by one exclusive remedy, Christ's 
blood of atonement, a soul may be recovered 
from its disease of sin, but there is hardly any 
one who doubts that an intelligence may finally 
get beyond the reach of this remedy. Not that 
the remedy is lacking in infinite power, but there 
comes a time with a sinner when the die is cast ; 
when there is nothing in him to respond to a 
call of mercy ; When there remains in him not a 
single aspiration to righteousness. There may 
be only a few who have crossed the dead line 
in this world, but no doubt there are a few, and 
all sinners certainly will have done so, when 
they pass into eternity. Man's tendency is a 
proof of the possibility that he may become 
hopelessly incorrigible; and such a creature, 
having reached such a state, if he lives forever 
must suffer forever. 

2. The inspired Book of God takes the po- 
sition that future punishment is eternal. Re- 
peatedly does it indicate this fact, but one pas- 
sage, the most inspired of the inspired, is suffi- 
cient; the words of Jesus: "These shall go 
away into everlasting punishment, but the right- 



68 The Hereafter. 

eous into life eternal." Matt. 25:46. In the 
original Greek, the word used for the duration 
of blessedness in this verse is exactly the same 
as that used for the duration of future punish- 
ment. Indeed it is the same word as is else- 
where used to indicate how long God is to live. 
There are three objections to the doctrine of 
future and eternal punishment which we will 
account worthy to be considered. One as- 
sumes to be a scriptural objection, one is senti- 
mental, and one assumes to be a philosophical 
objection. 

1 . It is held that where the Scriptures speak 
of the destruction of the wicked, and where 
other similar language is used, it means their 
annihilation. But let it be remembered that 
destruction and annihilation are far from being 
synonyms. While annihilation means to re- 
solve into nothing, destroy means to unbuild, so 
that the thing that was once glorious is in ruins, 
and that which was once useful is useless and 
abandoned. The meaning of death in such ex- 
pressions as "the second death" is somewhat 
similar. It may or may not involve the demise 
and unconsciousness of the body, but it always 
involves the conscious wretchedness of the soul. 

2. It is held that the sufferings of hell are not 
consistent with what we know to be God's at- 
tributes of goodness and power. This ob- 



The Hereafter. 69 

jection, if it holds good at all, does not touch 
the question of the eternity of hell; for if it is 
inconsistent, it would be as logically inconsistent 
for a century as for eternity. We are witnesses 
to the fact that suffering does exist. The 
world is full of it today, and has been for 
thousands of years. In hospitals and asylums, 
in cities and country places, in homes of rich 
and poor, and on land and sea. Hearts are 
aching ; bodies are racked with pain ; multitudes 
are wrung with mental anguish ; — a mother, be- 
cause a daughter is gone down in shame ; a com- 
panion, because of the infidelity of a compan- 
ion; a widow, because her staff of support is 
gone and the world is treating her cruelly; an 
orphan, because the li^ht of home and parental 
love have been extinguished, and the burdens of 
life are heavy. Here comes the black bor- 
dered letter ; the sad telegram ; the sudden trag- 
edy, or the days of sickness, and the black box. 
There is sorrow in the palace, there is anguish 
in the slums, there is trouble on the farm; a 
flood has drenched a city ; an earthquake has en- 
veloped a land with misery ; a storm has swept 
away the people's homes, bringing desolation 
and death. There is no end of suffering, there 
is no bound too it, and its volume cannot be 
measured ; yet God lives, He sees it all, and He 
is infinitely good and powerful. Can you un- 



70 The Hereafter. 

derstand that? No, no more than you can 
understand the sufferings of hell; not so well; 
yet you have to accept it, for you are facing it. 
We say you cannot understand it so well. 
There is more mystery attending earthly suf- 
fering, for it is so unevenly distributed, and 
there are many of whom it can be said, Neither 
did this man nor his parents sin, that he should 
suffer. Things are constituted so that oppress- 
ors have grown fat upon the oppressed ; the in- 
nocent often suffer the penalty of the misdoings 
of the guilty, and the guilty in many cases go 
apparently without suffering. But how differ- 
ent the sufferings of hell! No innocent feet 
walk its dark corridors. No defenseless wid- 
ows suffer from die heartlessness of wicked 
men; no godly mothers and fathers sit in the 
gloom wMi bleeding hearts and bewail miseries 
which they did not bring upon themselves; no 
innocent man lies crushed and bleeding from 
accidents due to the faults of others ; no hungry 
orphans cry for bread and suffer from the abuses 
of the cruel. Thus are the sufferings of hell 
more easily explained than the sufferings of 
earth, and hence more thinkable, in tlhe abstract. 
The inhabitants of another world who would 
betake themselves to a study of human suffering 
if you should hand them a text book upon the 
sufferings of hell and one upon the sufferings of 



The Hereafter. 71 

earth, would find it much easier to master the 
philosophy of the former than of the latter; and 
if they were inclined to be skeptical about one 
of the text books it would be that relating to 
earth ; not that the one relating to earth would 
describe punishment so severe and universal, 
but because it would depict the anguish of so 
many innocent sufferers. The sufferings of 
earth therefore teach us that the sufferings of 
hell can be. 

Sentimental students have widely mistaken 
tlhe character of God. His attributes represent 
a full circle ; He fulfills every office, whether it 
require a touch that is infinitely delicate, a stroke 
that is firm, or a thrust that is severe. Not only 
is He the God that planted the lilies, made the 
zephyrs, taught the birds to sing and put the 
twinkle in the stars and the azure in the skies; 
He made the stormy ocean and the whirling 
tempest. The winds and waves obey His will 
and the flames are His servants. He made man, 
and to Him belongs the prerogative of death. 
As truly as His mercy is a healing balm, His 
justice is a glittering sword; as truly as He is 
the Father of the righteous, He is the King of 
the universe; as truly as He is the Savior of 
them that believe, He is the Judge of quick and 
dead. We are taught to fear Him with a 
wholesome fear, and certainly we must expect 



72 The Hereafter. 

to find sometihing in Him to fear, else the lesson 
would be an idle one. 

3. It has been suggested that suffering could 
not be for an extended length of time; that man 
would become deadened and indifferent even 
to the punishment of hell ; but it is the immortal 
that suffers in hell, and the immortal does not 
lose sensibility like the mortal, whether it be 
the sensibility of pleasure or pain. A law 
which would make one indifferent to extended 
pain would make him indifferent to extended 
pleasure. Hence if an eternal hell cannot be 
fully realized, neither may an eternal heaven be 
fully realized. But we are in reach of this 
subject, and can examine it for ourselves. Ask 
the man of God if the pleasures of religion are 
a declining quantity. He will tell you that the 
joys of salvation are fresh every morning. The 
aged saint who leans upon his staff, experiences 
emotions that are many times richer than the 
pleasures of his early religious life, if he has 
proved true to his trust. The converse is true 
of the aged sinner. Who has not watched 
with horror the gatherings of the hell clouds in 
the life of a wicked man as age crept upon him. 
The most miserable vileness that I have ever 
seen was the vileness of an old soul after a life 
had been spent in sin. Nor was he deadened 
to his anguish. The grip of misery fastened 



The Hereafter. 73 

itself more consciously upon the man as the sun 
of his life wen't down. Nor will joys grow old 
in heaven, nor will sorrow grow old in hell. 
Could I be more happy ! will be the shout of a 
soul when it first looks upon the fields of the 
second Eden and the streets of the New Jeru- 
salem; but each thousand years will discover 
new sources of pleasure and consolation. How 
time must fly in heaven. I think that Saint 
Paul and Moses feel 'that they have been there 
scarcely a week ! But is it not the reverse in 
hell ? Do not the lost in that fathomless abyss 
discover new sources of horror and new things 
to remind Dhem in their regrets as the centuries 
pass ? The unmarked years must drag by with 
great tediousness. 



74 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER XIV. 

FUTURE REWARDS. 

A reward is something that comes because 
of merit. An infant, redeemed by the blood 
of Christ, being saved, is received into heaven; 
it has an eternal home. What its future may 
be in the infinite universe of God remains for 
us to speculate. It cannot, however, be re- 
warded for anything that it has done in this 
world. But, we are taught in l!he Scriptures 
that aside from the fact that they are cleansed 
and qualified for heaven by the atoning blood, 
a great multitude of people are to receive a re- 
ward for the deeds done in the body. 

The word reward is used in the Scriptures 
in both a good and an evil sense ; but its prom- 
inent meaning has reference to blessing rather 
than punishment. We will here use it in this 
light. As we look upon the population of this 
world with its manifold grades of merit and de- 
merit, it relieves us to know that the future dis- 
tribution of rewards is to be undertaken by the 
omniscient God. 

The Holy Spirit in inditing tihe Scriptures, 
has chosen to remain silent in regard to details 
when speaking of future rewards. We are 



The Hereafter. 75 

given to understand that some rewards will be 
greater than others, wihen the Bible speaks of 
one star differing from another star in glory, 
and people being rewarded according to the 
deeds done in the body. The extent of our 
service in the Master's vineyard on earth is 
made the principal basis upon which our reward 
shall be estimated. Of course, not to speak of 
service, our suffering for Jesus' sake will en- 
hance the glory that shall be revealed in us here- 
after. Included in "the sufferings of this 
present time" are the bearing of the brunt of re- 
ligious persecution, the sacrificing of luxuries 
and comforts for the good of others and for the 
promotion of Christ's kingdom, and the patient 
endurance of temporal hardships, obscurity and 
hamperings that fall to our portion. 

Our sufferings may be classified under two 
general headings ; we would place in one group 
that kind of suffering which more directly con- 
tributes to the spread of the kingdom of heaven 
and partakes of the nature of service in the 
Lord's vineyard ; in the other group, we would 
place those sufferings which cannot, in their na- 
ture, edify any but the individuals who patient- 
ly endure them. Now, no human being is able 
to trace the boundary line between these two 
classes of suffering; for we may think that one 
who is bearing much affliction is only keeping 



76 The Hereafter. 

himself, when the light of his Christlike patience 
radiates to inspire and bless a thousand others. 
Again, when we see some care-worn mother 
darning socks or mending little garments by 
lamp light, bending her form from day to day 
under the toil and confinement of a busy home 
life and shortening her days by spending anx- 
ous, sleepless nights, trying to reduce the fever 
and soothe the pain of some little sufferer, we 
say, "Poor woman; — much toil and little pay." 
We get the idea that her sphere is limited, and 
that, while her labor and fortitude will re- 
act favorably upon her own soul, she cannot be 
classed with such immortal sufferers as John 
Bunyan, whose suffering gave impetus to the 
spread of the kingdom, and that she will have 
no cumulative reward, because her sufferings do 
not 'take the nature of evangelical service, such 
as that rendered by St. Paul or John Wesley. 
But, we must remember that it was one of these 
same toiling, care-worn mothers that nourished 
St. Paul upon her breast, that rocked John 
Bunyan in his little cradle, and gave John Wes- 
ley his earliest impression. It is always possi- 
ble that one who is toiling and suffering in per- 
petual obscurity, is touching some one else who 
will not only touch a nation or a continent, but 
who will touch several generations. 

We now return to the statement that the ex- 



The Hereafter. 77 

tent of our service in the Master's vineyard on 
earth shall be the basis upon Which our reward 
is estimated. "They that be wise shall shine 
as the brightness of the firmament; and they 
that turn many to righteousness, as the stars for- 
ever and ever." You remember that wisdom 
is the execution of knowledge; so that while 
knowledge is what we possess, wisdom is what 
we do. It is we'll therefore to reflect upon the 
fact that it is not they that have knowledge, but 
they that be wise that shall shine the brightest. 
No doubt this shining does not have reference 
to the mere outward appearance; it is rather a 
beautiful figure that relates to the magnitude of 
that reward which belongs to them whose lives 
have been full of diligent service. 

I made mention of cumulative reward. Per- 
haps as I used liberty in appropriating this term, 
it would be well to dwell upon it a moment. 
We mean that which accumulates to a man's 
credit after the death of his body. The title of 
this chapter, "Future Rewards," applies not 
only to us who are still in the vineyard, but to 
the Christian fathers who we say have passed 
to their reward. They are only enjoying part 
of their reward now ; much of it is future. How 
could you place to his credit all that is due St. 
Paul, or any other saint that started great move- 
ments, left examples and wrote books which are 



78 The Hereafter. 

today doing more good than ever? It would be 
impossible unless the God of infinite foreknowl- 
edge should anticipate the result of their labors 
and pay them in advance. This He has not 
chosen to do, but has postponed the completing 
of all rewards until His coming, of which He 
says, "Behold, I come quickly; and my reward 
is with me, to give every man according as his 
work shall be." The distribution of rewards 
will be involved with unlimited technicalities, 
but God can easily solve them all and give to 
every one his just deserts. It may be that some 
of your progeny in generations to come will be 
a ligjit to tlhem that sit in darkness, and the in- 
strument for winning a million souls. If any 
faithfulness or diligence on your part has start- 
ed a current that will help to produce this char- 
acter, it will be placed to your credit on the ac- 
count books up yonder. While the reward of 
the great evangelists of past centuries will not 
be ruduced in the least on this account, it is 
well understood that God will duly reward ev- 
ery one, no matter how remote, who had a part 
in producing those characters that have blessed 
the world. 

Our future reward should be a chief stimulus 
in our trials and battles here below. The mag- 
nitude, the enduring splendor and the whole- 
some delight of this heavenlv reward has per- 



The Hereafter. 79 

haps never entered into the heart of man. 
Earthly pleasures fail, carnal joys lose their 
sweetness, a reward of glittering gold can be 
swept from our hands in a day ; but the Master 
teaches that we may lay up treasures in heav- 
en, where moth and rust do not corrupt, nor 
thieves break through and steal. Moses had 
respect to the recompense of his reward, and 
Paul said, 'Henceforth there is laid up for me 
a crown." 

God intends for the stimulating hope of an 
unspeakable reward in the next age to cause us 
to leave our earthly haunts of ease and self- 
seeking to save precious souls. The offer of 
these rewards is in itself an emphasis upon the 
inestimable value of an immortal soul. The 
question of one of our sweetest modern songs, 
"Will there be any stars in my crown?" should 
fire the heart of every soldier of Jesus Christ. 



80 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER XV. 

RECOGNITION IN HEAVEN. 

Two kinds of normal love may and should 
dwell at once in the heart of man; the one a 
relative love, the other a benevolent love. With 
the former we love people according to their re- 
lationship to us or according to their loveliness. 
This love makes possible the organization of so- 
ciety into families, communions, and nations. 
With this love it is natural and right to love 
some better than others, and not to love at all 
in some cases. It was never intended that with 
the relative love faculty man should love his 
neighbor as himself, or love the heathen on the 
other side of the globe. But the heart is a ves- 
sel which can be full of both kinds of love at 
once, just as a vacuum can be filled at once with 
light and air, and the increase of one does not 
diminish the other. This oilier love of benev- 
olence is little known by those not born of the 
Spirit, and not known in its completeness to any 
but those who are filled with the Spirit. With 
this love we love all alike ; other people's fam- 
ilies as well as our own. Mean people as well 
as good people; heretics as well as "kindred 
minds"; people whom we have not seen; the 
homely as well as the beautiful. 



The Hereafter. 81 

It is thus that we explain one problem in con- 
templating heaven. Some have advanced the 
barren and unwieldly thought that all of heav- 
en's inhabitants will appear alike to us, and be 
equally dear ; that a perfect society excludes re- 
lationships and groupings. But some basis for 
the grouping or districting of society, spring- 
ing out of relative love, is necessary to the per- 
fect organization of a commonwealth; and 
while the relationship of man and wife and of 
relative and relative shall not be defined there 
just as it is here, a relationship will certainly ex- 
ist, and be preserved by a bond of relative af- 
fection. There is no reason and very little at- 
traction in the thought that in heaven our loved 
ones will amount to no more than other people 
to us. 

Arising from these thoughts, is tlhe question 
of 'recognition in heaven. Recognition in heav- 
en would not be an attractive subject were it not 
for the truth of the above observations. If 
relative love were only an earthly plant, it 
would be of little moment to an intelligent mind, 
whether he ever met his loved ones again. In- 
dividuality being practically blotted out, it 
would give him the same pleasure to meet some 
one of whom he never heard that it would to 
meet his own mother or child. This would add 
pathetic features to our parting at death, and 



82 The Hereafter. 

would tend to discourage "natural affection" 
in this life, whereas the absence of natural af- 
fection is recognized by the apostle as noncon- 
formity to heaven's laws, and a sign of great 
depravity. 

We may think of a newly arrived soul in 
heaven as being very much like the unfallen 
Adam in Eden, with regard 'to mental attain- 
ments. Adam's mind faculties were perfect, 
though it would be absurd to think therefore 
that his knowledge was complete. He was ca- 
pable of acquiring knowledge rapidly, but he 
had to acquire it. He had the thirst for knowl- 
edge which belongs to a normal mind, for it 
was of this that Satan took advantage when he 
tempted him to sin. A newly arrived soul in 
heaven will have brought with him all the true 
knowledge which he laboriously acquired upon 
the earth — small at best, limited in the smartest 
of men; related to our possible attainments in 
heaven something as a completed kindergarten 
course is related to the post-graduate studies of 
a university and all that comes between. Much 
of our knowledge When we arrive in heaven will 
have to be expunged or pruned. Either by 
means of perfect intuition we will instantly dis- 
card many of our former tenets of so-called 
knowledge, or else by our progressive discovery 
of facts in the case our knowledge will be sifted. 



The Hereafter. 83 

The infant will begin at the foundation of true 
knowledge. It may be supposed that every- 
thing in heaven is conducive to perfect develop- 
ment, and also to rapid development, in the pri- 
mary or rudimentary principles of knowledge. 
The drudgery and mental travail necessary to 
progress here, may not be known there. Ev- 
ery exercise is pleasant in heaven. 

The quality and color, and also the fulness, 
of our mental attainments, trace themselves up- 
on the surface of our being in this life, and shall 
in the hereafter. It is therefore true that at- 
tainments or lack of attainments affect a man's 
personal appearance. For this reason, it is pos- 
sible that our recognition of loved ones and 
former acquaintances in heaven may not be in- 
stantaneous, especially in a case where the loved 
one died in infancy. We may not know them, 
and it is certain that they cannot, by any nat- 
ural method, know us. That might be true if 
one of our loved ones should spend many years 
in London or Paris, and we should visit them 
there. But though this may be true in the 
heavenly state, they will be no less our loved 
ones, when the acquaintance is made, and our 
natural affections, which represent an eternal 
faculty of the human soul, will be just as warm 
and pleasant as if we had been separated from 
them but a day. 



84 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER XVI. 

THE UNBRIDGED GULF. 

There are certain substances in the material 
world which may be easily shaped into articles 
of utility while they are new, but Which as they 
grow older become less plastic, until the time 
comes, finally, that they cannot be worked at 
all, when an effort to change them from what 
they are now into something else would sim- 
ply involve their destruction. That is, 
their probationary period has passed; 
their day of grace has ended. There is full 
proof that this fact obtains among rational creat- 
ures, in the realm of heart and mind. You 
may follow man from the period of infancy till 
he is full of years, and at every stage you will 
notice evidence of a gradual fixing of character. 
When he is a little child he may be literally 
molded like wax, and marred as easily as 
molded. Wlhen he is a youth he may be carv- 
ed like chalk, but the one who does the shaping 
finds that if his work is turned over to a spoiler 
it is soon undone. When he reaches young 
manhood he is like a soft stone, which must be 
chiseled into shape, but which holds its shape 
beautifully, though to smaslh the image is by 



The Hereafter. 85 

no means impossible. Then it seems that the 
weather begins in earnest to harden the mate- 
rial, and every year reduces the probability that 
the image will ever be marred. Beyond the 
age of young manhood man passes through 
stage after stage in the hardening process, rep- 
resented by the different kinds of workable 
stones found in the earth, till he becomes like 
that stone which the sculptor always avoids, be- 
cause it yields not one particle of obedience to 
his splendid tools and his skillful strokes. 

In the various stages after man passes a given 
period the value of the crude material goes 
down, because he ceases more and more to be 
available for the higher product of the sculptor's 
art. Thus we see that the soul of man grows 
less flexible and less plastic every year of his 
life, whether he be a good or a bad man; and 
there is no reason to doubt that this gradual fix- 
ing goes on till his character becomes an im- 
pregnable wall. Such is the character of Sa- 
tan, unapproachable in darkness and depravity ; 
such is the character of an angel of God, unap- 
proachable in purity and light, and beyond the 
reach of seduction or contamination. And 
may it not be that some of the subjects of Satan 
reach that period of unapproachable darkness 
before they leave this world? And have we 
not seen some of the servants of God upon 



86 The Hereafter. 

whose perseverance we could safely calculate, 
to whom that scripture applies which says, "He 
shall go no more out*'? 

One of the glories of heaven, an assurance 
that in the case of every inhabitant its bliss shall 
be eternal, is in that statement that "there shall 
be no more curse" — no execration; nobody will 
change. It is ibis same property in man Which 
fixes the eternity of hell. The limitation is not 
in God, but in man. The mercy of God is 
boundless and limitless ; it endureth forever, ap- 
ply it to whom you will; but when 
man passes the salvable stage he is 
eternally lost, whether he be in this or fche 
other side of the river of Death. The gulf 
between tbe rich man and Lazarus was the 
same gulf that is between Gabriel and Satan, 
not measured by miles and leagues, but quite as 
real, and more impassable than if it were. It 
is a moral gulf ; and moral distances, after they 
reach a certain limit, cannot be bridged even 
by infinity. 

The 55frli of Isaiah gives us the thought of a 
moral distance, where certain persons are rep- 
resented as being near, but in danger of being 
farther, even out of hearing. The writer goes 
on to say that returning unto the Lord consists 
in abandoning the moral differences between 
the soul and God — "Let 'the wicked forsake 



The Hereafter. 87 

his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts : 
and let him return unto the Lord." 

No bridge could be built across the gulf be- 
tween Dives and Lazarus, but the bridge of the 
atonement in Jesus Christ spans the gulf be- 
tween tlhe sinner and God, until that sinner, con- 
tinuing to neglect his eternal interests, fixes the 
difference between himself and his maker; the 
difference thus fixed, the love of God notwith- 
standing, the death of Christ in vain, the die is 
cast forever. 



88 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER XVII. 

THE ULTIMATE KINGDOM. 

A kingdom is a government. When Jesus told 
his disciples that the kingdom of God was with- 
in or among them, he meant the government of 
God; that God was king, so far as they were 
concerned. In substance, then, the term king- 
dom of God, used in its various employments, 
means about the same, and an added adjective 
must relate chiefly to its extent of development. 
It is stages rather than kinds of kingdoms refer- 
red to, when 'the term finds different employ- 
ments in religious literature. 

They beheld only the shadows of the king- 
dom in the days prior to Moses, and with Moses 
came only the bare outline, to be imperfectly 
recognized in the commonwealth of Israel. 
With John the Baptist there came a voice say- 
ing, '"The kingdom of heaven is at hand" ; and 
under the ministry of Jesus Christ people of all 
nations began to long for citizenship and groan 
for naturalization. 

Defined in the words of Paul, this kingdom 
has three fundamental properties; righteousness, 
peace and joy. The kingdom is made up of 
subjects, and these subjects furnish the setting 



The Hereafter. 89 

for these three fundamental properties. It may 
be said of every one who resides in the kingdom 
of God that he is righteous, peaceful, joyful. 
The kingdom begins in the heart; it widens into 
a community, it is to spread to the nations, but 
it finds its highest representation in heaven 
above. Heaven above is simply a great gov- 
ernment, where millions of subjects, under per- 
fect divine control, with the law of God en- 
graved in mind and affection, serve their King, 
and are free from every inward and outward 
inducement to treason or disloyalty. 

Wherever you find it, the kingdom of God 
is a progressive force; it comes with power and 
it comes with subtlety, but it is always coming. 
It is "not of this world" in the sense that earthly 
weapons can bring it about. The most that we 
shall see of it in the world will not be at the 
close of a sanguine battle; yet it shall come, 
noiseless as the sun comes galloping over the 
hills in the morning, modestly as the rootlet 
breaks open the rock and puts forth into a tree 
with spreading foliage, generously as the leaven 
inflates the flattened dough cake into a liberal 
loaf. 

Jesus Christ did not conceal his purpose to 
conquer the world. He said the Father had 
put the times and seasons in his own power, and 
we doubt not that the nature of the seasons is 



90 The Hereafter. 

so wondrously concealed from us that we can 
hardily detect the passing of their winters, 
springs, summers and autumns ; yet trie kingdom 
is coming, and "the seventh angel'* is destined 
to say that the kingdoms of this world are be- 
come the kingdoms of our Lord and of his 
Christ. But he will have no need of their 
thrones nor of their palaces. His throne is 
already exalted, and the palaces of his servants, 
now under construction, will already be com- 
pleted; it is the subjects of these kingdoms who 
shall become his. There is no mistaking the 
purpose of Christ. He gave us our weapons, 
mightier than swords, more invincible than bat- 
tle ships ; he puts in us the ideals which he would 
work out in the world, and bids us go to our 
task of producing the principles of his kingdom, 
in hearts, communities and nations. He per- 
mits us to use "all means in doing it, excepting 
means of violence and dishonor, the ballot, but 
not the sword; the platform, but not the Whip- 
ping post; the school room, but not the bribe. 
Back of all, and permeating all, are prayer and 
the word of God. 

The kingdom of God on earth, manifested 
through its subjects, is a practical working force. 
They claim the world for Christ; they stand 
without musket or sword and bravely deny all 
evil practices and traffics the right to exist on 



The Hereafter. 91 

the face of the earth. On yesterday it struck 
the death blow to slavery, on tomorrow it will 
finish the legalized liquor traffic, break up the 
intricate organizations of graft and uproot the 
white slave trade. Happy the thought; the 
kingdom of God is an inevitable force. It 
works while we sleep ; it makes worth while the 
investment of our strength as disciples of Jesus 
Christ. 

But what of the ultimate kingdom? The 
expression implies the coming of a day when 
there shall be nothing else to conquer; when 
there shall be no ambassadors, for tlhere shall 
be no foreign ports ; when there shall be no sol- 
diers, for the fate of the rebellion shall be de- 
cided. Then we shall be forever with the 
Lord; 

Then up with yonder sacred throng, 

We at His feet shall fall, 
And join the everlasting song, 

And crown Him Lord of all. 



92 The Hereafter. 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE CITY OF THE-LORD-IS-THERE. 

It was in an hour of vision, when I found 
myself walking up a plain road with 'handsome 
guide posts on the left. Next to the index fin- 
gers on these guide posts could be seen four 
words welded into one — The^Lord-is-Tliere. I 
felt weary with loneliness, but happy with hope. 
The Lord is everywhere indeed, I said, but in 
many places He will not allow Himself to ap- 
pear, and it is the same as if He were not there. 
But in some places He dwells and appears. If 
His light can glow in a heart, and the bells of 
music can celebrate His presence there, why 
may He not dwell in a city? 

In a few minutes I came to the suburbs of the 
city. I found that entrance was free, but IJhat 
many chose to dwell on a lower plane, just out- 
side the gate. Those within were much hap- 
pier than those without, but those in the sub- 
urbs fared better than the settlers whom I had 
seen on the lonely roadside far away. 

At the entrance of one of the gates I saw an 
inhabitant of the place. His countenance was 
exceedingly pure, and the light of joy was m 
his eye. "Am I in heaven, or upon the earth?" 



The Hereafter. 93 

I said. "You are on earth," said the man, 
"but strangers coming here frequently think they 
are in heaven, because we borrow our customs 
and fashions from heaven, and abide by the 
same laws. Indeed the place on which this 
city is built was selected in view of the climate, 
and it is a climate similar to that of heaven. 
People are daily traveling from here to heaven, 
and I am told that they encounter none of the 
inconvenience which comes to those who change 
climates." "I have read of heaven," I said, 
"in the book of Revelation, and your city meets 
the description." "And well it does," said the 
man, "for so it should. I will show you where- 
in they are alike, and wherein they differ. Do 
you see these wall's? They are for protection 
and beauty ; but in heaven they are for beauty 
only for a great gulf of space separates heaven 
from the wicked, and there is no danger there. 
Again, you see our gates open and close; but 
the gates of the New Jerusalem have no shut- 
ters, because there is no one near to invade. As 
you came up the road you met a few people 
who had down-cast eyes and blushing cheeks. 
They were leaving this city, and you would 
have embarrassed them greatly, if you had 
asked them why, for they had no reason ; but in 
heaven there is no going out — 'there is no curse 
at the threshold." 



94 The Hereafter. 

Upon entering this city I found that it guard- 
ed ithe harbor on a beautiful sea, Where many 
full rigged ships lay at anchor, and I was told 
that the winds which blew heavenward were 
more reliable than the trade winds of the East. 
At all hours of the day could be seen the beau- 
tiful ceremonies of an anchor^lifting, and I 
learned that from this port alone people could 
get transportation to the heavenly country. 

At the close of the vision I thought of its 
moral : 

1 . There is a spiritual Zion, into which we 
enter at conversion. There we meet the Lord, 
become subjects of His kingdom and receive 
His sanctifying grace. 

2. There is a road leading all of us to this 
city of Salvation, and truth and common sense 
teach us that the Lord is there. 

3. The inhabitants of spiritual Zion observe 
God's laws, and seek to do His will "on earth 
as it is done in heaven.*' 

4. We have possession of the only harbor 
from Which ships sail heavenward. Ships from 
all other ports launch out upon a stormy sea for- 
ever. 

5. The backslider has cause to blush, and 
no reason to allege for turning away from the 
Lord. 



The Hereafter. 95 

6. There is a low plane upon which moral- 
ists and unconverted church members live which 
may be better than to be far out in the darkness 
of sin, but they are not in the city of The-Lord- 
Is-There. Those who live in this spiritual city 
can say: 

"Content while beholding His face, 

My all to His pleasure resigned; 
No changes of season or place, 

Can make any change in my mind. 
While blest with a sense of His love, 

A palace a toy would appear, 
And prisons would palaces prove, 

If Jesus would dwell with me there.'* 



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